Rachel Ferber

Rachel Ferber is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and educator. She integrates domestic waste and found forms into videos, sculptures and textiles that explore sticky intersections of power, performance and sustainability through the lens of commodified private space. Ferber holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S and Canada. In addition to her studio practice, she runs an experimental natural dye project called The Dye Bath and is one half of the art and design initiative NEW NEW NEW.

I’m interested in intentionally inefficient and impermanent processes that work toward generative, rather than productive, ends. Centering the home and the body—our most intimate sites of consumption—my practice begins with collecting and considering the artifacts and residues of my own material usage. Unassuming forms like food scraps and would-be-discarded objects are reconfigured as DIY green screens, props and garments that I use to explore speculative modes of resistance to capitalist pressures. Slowness and inefficiency challenge the environmentally and emotionally destructive mindset of hyper-productivity; while acts of misdirection allow for testing and organizing without detection. Who would suspect sourdough discard, throw pillows and ephemeral natural pigments of any potential for disruption? These subtly bizarre scenarios offer possibilities to reclaim agency, while also acting as a mirror to examine our relationships to material and its potential for harm. Might play be a method of reorienting ourselves?